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A Call for College Students to Help Shape Their States’ Clean Power Plans

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A Call for College Students to Help Shape Their States’ Clean Power Plans

By Andrew C. Revkin March 6, 2016 1:27 pmMarch 6, 2016 1:27 pm

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A coal-fired power plant in Winfield, W.Va. The E.P.A.’s Clean Power Plan, which aims to shift away from coal, has faced stiff opposition from politicians and corporations.Credit Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg

Updated, 3:13 p.m. | Back in January, Eban Goodstein, the director of the Bard College Center for Environmental Policy, distributed an invitation to college students and faculty across the United States to participate in “Power Dialog,” an exciting effort to mesh learning and civic engagement around the nation’s efforts to curtail power plant emissions of carbon dioxide, the main human-generated gas contributing to global warming.*

The focus is the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. Despite the Supreme Court ruling delaying the plan, not to mention the turbulent presidential race, the plan’s mix of regulation and regional flexibility is likely to persist well into the future. The academic effort, which is nonpartisan, centers on a nationwide series of meetings in state capitals April 4 in which students can offer their views to top state officials.

Know a college student or a teacher? Then you can help 10,000 students around the country, and hundreds in your own state, change their future.

The week of April 4, 2016 The Power Dialog is organizing conversations in every state capitol between students and the top regulators in their state charged with reducing global warming pollution under the E.P.A.’s Clean Power Plan. The E.P.A.’s new rule is the main vehicle enabling the 30 percent cuts in pollution pledged by the U.S. in Paris.

But so far, the regulators drafting statewide pollution reduction plans have not heard from their most critical stakeholders: young people who will actually be around in 2050, living through the consequences of our action — or inaction — today.

The Power Dialog gives young people that vital voice.

The model is simple. Faculty teaching courses in environmental studies, energy, climate change, environmental politics, economics, or sociology include material on the Clean Power Plan. They then bring their classes on field trips to the state capitol for the Dialog. Students reach out to their faculty to insure their classes are included. With fifteen to twenty college, university or high school classes involved in each state, hundreds of students statewide will have the chance to get educated about the Clean Power Plan. Then, they engage directly with their state’s top regulator about cutting global warming pollution locally.

The Power Dialog, organized nationally by The Center for Environmental Policy at Bard College, is not an advocacy or lobbying project. There is no legislative agenda. Rather, the goal is simply to educate thousands of young people about the emerging new rules for climate protection, and to give them a chance to talk face-to-face with the state regulators who are shaping their future.

So here’s the easy and effective way you can help. Pass this post along to the students, faculty and educational staff you know to build the Power Dialog in their state. Our country, and our world, critically need the voices of 10,000 engaged young people next April, and beyond.

Do this now, and get your year changing the climate started strong. Lots more opportunities to come.

You can also keep track and spread the word via @thePowerDialog on Twitter:

Are Students a Missing Voice on Climate Post-Paris? Not any more: @BardCEP @ThePowerDialog #SCOTUS #CleanPowerPlan https://t.co/zPzK3TT2Sq

And I couldn’t help notice how the Power Dialog is echoed at the high school level by Change Climate Change, an initiative by some students at the Marlborough School in Los Angeles aiming to engage with government officials shaping their city’s energy and climate policies. In an email a few days ago, Clara Nevins, a tenth grader there, asked this question:

We are able to organize hundred of students to write to politicians, capitalists, or other decision makers to express the concerns of the next generation about climate change. Our problem is that we don’t know exactly how to harness this energy…who to write to and about what specific piece of legislation or reform.

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.